The Morning-Glory had been through too sore a storm to lift its head for a while; it cowered, beaten and draggled upon its vine: in other words, Jessica, wet to the skin through her heavy sweater, sand-coated from her shoulders to her canvas toes, curled down upon the beach, her cold cheek pillowed upon its safe sands and utterly refused to be comforted.
In vain the two Boy Scouts assured her that she was all right now, that just as soon as she got over her fright they would take her to their Boy Scout Camp away off among the dunes or, better still, to another summer camp, not so distant, where there were women and she could get some dry clothes, because “we don’t want to rig a Camp Fire Girl up as a boy!” said Kenjo half-bashfully.
The overwrought girl paid no heed to them. At last as the nervous storm spent itself, she lifted her head a little and noticed sitting before her on the beach a figure in a blue shirt with a close-fitting red, tasseled cap upon its head and a long plank at its feet.
It was Toiney, her lithe, sinewy figure rescuer, whom she had heard Kenjo laud as being “queer stuff, but the stuff,” on the evening that Ken and his brother Scout who imagined himself poisoned had spent at the girls’ camp on the Sugarloaf.
Vaguely she remembered hearing Kenjo say that this Toiney was a French-Canadian with a little remote strain of Indian blood in him, who gave the Scouts lessons in wood-craft, trailing and tracking.
Presently Toiney glanced round at her and muttered consolingly in the funniest jumble of dialect French and broken English: “Tiens! ma fille, t’as pas besoin to cryee—engh?” Then he began to relieve his feelings by softly abusing the quicksands. “Ach, diable! she’s devil quicksan’,” he gurgled. “She’s bad, dam’ devil quicksan’!” the flicking of his red tassel lending color to the curses.
“Oh! don’t call the—the quicksands ‘she’!” Morning-Glory suddenly sat up, indignant on behalf of her sex, a little hysterical spasm of laughter contending with her sobs; because she was no pure, passionless flower, but a very human girl, it did her a rousing lot of good to hear the quicksands called bad names, after their treating her so meanly when the sea had cast her ashore among them.
“Engh?” Toiney grunted questioningly as he looked over his blue shoulder at her. “Sapré! w’at time I’ll see you sink in her, I’ll t’ink I see two, t’ree girl go down!”
“Oh! one was enough.” Jessica’s laugh pattered now between her chattering teeth, like sunlit hail through rain; she understood her rescuer’s description of the dazed horror in which he had sought up and down for a saving plank.
“How on earth did you come to be by yourself on that lonely part of the Neck—and so wet, too?” asked Miles Stackpole whose skin had not the golden hue at this minute that it showed when he worked for the resuscitation of little, deaf-and-dumb Rebecca; instead it betrayed a greenish tinge around the edges of his tan; three or four minutes of being trapped by one leg in wicked quicksands, knowing that the other limb, stretched out along their sucking surface, was very slowly sinking, too, that he would certainly be swallowed up alive if help did not come, and quickly, was no enviable experience.